


please, could you be tender?

by mindshelter



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Peter Parker Gets a Hug, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Spider-Man: Far From Home, catharsis for myself?, not sure what this is - light angst? hurt/comfort?, petermj with a dollop of irondad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 17:54:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20086339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindshelter/pseuds/mindshelter
Summary: There’s no evidence of what had happened – the cuts and bruises across his body seen through the tears of his suit, the bloody nose, the red eyes – all gone. Ned has him in a tight hold and Peter just snickers as he stage whispers, “I was only in Germany for, like, two days, man.”Peter uproots his head from where it’s buried into Ned’s shoulder and casts her a look. It’s fond, happy, and just a smidge timid.or: Peter rejoins his class on their flight from London to NYC, he and MJ like each other a lot, and they try to get used to no longer needing to pine from a distance. Post-Far From Home, before the mid-credits scene.





	please, could you be tender?

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't written fanfic since i was 12 and i'm certainly not 12 now, but endgame and far from home did something to me. 
> 
> this is a pretty rough, short work that i wanted to get out of my system and explore the immediate aftermath of the snap because the mcu wont do it for us 
> 
> happy reading! i hope whoever is here enjoys this

MJ is shuffling through the rotating glass doors of Gatwick’s international departures terminal, legs feeling like lead from fatigue, when twin buzzes sound from her and Ned’s phones. Then, it buzzes again.

She had left Tower bridge in a light jog, the exhilaration of finding Peter mostly in one piece – (“I like it better broken,” she told him) – blending with the residual sweat, smoke and stress. She hadn’t even glared at Ned, who had given her a knowing smirk once he had exhausted his questions about Peter and his well-being.

Nonetheless, MJ had tried for nonchalance when she asked, “Did sweaty guy leave?”

Ned had come closer and whispered, “Yeah, his name’s Happy, by the way. He probably went to get Peter.”

Not long after, the boy inaugurated her into a new groupchat, tastefully titled as a web emoji, a spider emoji, and another web emoji. She checked the members – it was just Peter, her, and Ned.

Now, MJ is stands still among the sea of people bustling around for check-in and baggage tags, pulling her phone out of her pocket and opening up her messaging app.

_:^)_, reads a text sent from Peter Parker himself. The next says,_ eta 5 min? happy’s bringing me over. can you guys lmk what door you’re closest to? _

Huh.

_

“How do you still have your passport?”

Peter fidgets. “Uh. Actually, I did lose my other one. This one’s from Fury.”

“Oh. Okay.”

_

Back when half the world hadn’t spent five years as ash in the wind, Peter was coltish, constantly at risk of bubbling over with nervous energy. She’d watch from her corner in the cafeteria as he mooned over Liz, looking every bit a stupid, lovesick teenager. He seemed to settle into himself a while into sophomore year, a good couple notches less erratic. Mr. Harrington had simply tutted to himself,_ Well, a young man does have his moments. He just needed to get a good ol’ dose of rebellious impulse out of his system_ when Peter had, astoundingly, perfect attendance to AcaDec for a whole month.

MJ wasn’t sure Peter had done anything like find himself, or anything fake-deep like that, but from then on, by virtue of just being physically present, it quickly became evident that his friendliness was never out of guilt for skirting his responsibilities. He is, tragically, just a good person.

They’re past the security gates waiting for Flash to repack his backpack, side-by-side near one of the flight schedule bulletins. MJ watches Peter cross his arms, uncross them, and toy with the sleek sunglasses hanging from his shirt before he turns to her.

“Hey, MJ?” 

“Yeah?”

“You wanna sit together on the plane?” he asks, tentative. There’s a worrying, dull purple tinge under his eyes and his skin is a degree too pale, but Peter’s expression is so hopeful, so trusting despite the shitstorm (_hah_) that’s been the past couple of days that MJ’s heart flutters.

He’s cute, sue her. “Me? Be next to Peter Parker for hours?”

Peter, pleasantly, doesn’t flounder. He just blinks, once, slowly, before a smile blooms on his face. It brings little specks of white into his eyes from reflecting the overhead lights, like they’re glimmering. He’s got baby stars in his eyes, sparkling against dark hazel.

“That is absolutely what I’m saying,” he says.

“Then yes.” 

Peter beams, and MJ knows her own grin is getting embarrassingly big, too.

_

Another thing that Peter is: gentle.

They’re by their gate now, sitting on the faux leather chairs that go on row after row. MJ had picked a spot closer to the tall windows of the building, putting a small distance between her and the rest of the class. Peter joins her in staring at the planes moving down the runway against a pale, blue sky.

The soft curl of his fingers against her neck when they had kissed around the post-battle wreckage is back, with Peter resting a careful hand on MJ’s shoulder. He had gotten up to talk to Ned about fifteen minutes ago, both of them retreating to another corner for their heart-to-heart. When they return, Ned pulls Peter into a tight hug that startles a laugh out of the other boy.

Back in his seat next to her, Peter says, “I’m sorry this trip was such a mess.” His voice is quiet and sincere. MJ makes a noise of protest, but Peter’s grip just tightens.

“No, like seriously. I should have been way more careful – not have been so wrapped up in my own – stuff.” He pauses, takes a breath. “I know I didn’t start this. But I could’ve done better.”

Peter has no intention to budge on this, MJ realizes, so she swallows her exasperation (and the tiny fraction of her that wants him to speak more highly of himself) and nods. He nods back.

“And another thing. How… are you? Are you okay?”

MJ squints at him. “I’m good?” she answers, incredulous. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

Peter snorts, but there is no humour in it. “Hey. Beck tried to kill you guys. And Happy told me about the drones and hiding in a museum – hence the, uh. Mace you were carrying when you found me. Not exactly in the itinerary.” 

_Touché_, Parker. “It was. But I’m good, really." 

Peter’s lips thin into a firm, straight line before he concedes. “If you say so. It’s just – this stuff is stressful, you know? It took me a while, but I learned to consider how it affects the people who are in on my whole… extracurricular. Even Ned gets a bit anxious about it sometimes.” Then his voice lowers into a hush, leaning closer, as if anyone around them is paying attention to their conversation. “When May found out about Spider-man she was out of her mind for a bit. Tony said she put the fear of God into him that day.”

MJ thinks of the sunglasses on his chest, the whole ordeal with hyper-realistic illusions and killer drones. The blatant fondness – wistful, yearning – in his voice when he mentions Tony Stark. Her own uneasiness among this entire ordeal, suddenly up-close and very personal with someone who’d dealt with the extraordinary and supernatural more than most would ten, twenty lifetimes.

For all the shit New York has had to deal with in the past decade or so, MJ had felt comfortably distanced from it, never registering it as one of the more immediate threats in her life. _It’s never going to be me _is a common mindset when people see tragedies and violence through the plush distance of a televised broadcast, after all. _It’s never you until it is_.

It doesn’t feel that way now, looking at the fluffy mass of chestnut hair on Peter’s head and reveling in the ever-present warmth that comes off him in waves. He’s perpetually in danger. And sometimes not the garden-variety mugger type, either.

She wants just a little longer to process everything. To digest it in smaller bites so that she doesn’t wake up with an ache in her stomach.

MJ takes a hand and places it on his back. “I appreciate this. I’m alright, honest." 

“You’ll let me know if it’s ever not? I don’t want to screw this up, MJ.” Peter’s gaze flickers from her face, to her lips, and it lingers on the black shards strung around her neck. 

“Only if you do,” she replies, and then presses a kiss to his nose.

This time, Peter does flush a warm, pleased pink.

_

Among her immediate family, MJ and her father had been dusted. Her brother, already on his third year of undergrad in North Carolina, was spared. So was her mother, until she passed anyway two years into the blip. An alien invasion couldn’t kill her, but sheer exhaustion and a tumble down a flight of stairs did. Though all gone, her brother later returned to New York, settling down at the edges of the city to be closer to his family.

After about a week or so of absolute, hellish chaos - after MJ rematerialized in the run-down hallway to her former apartment and a global network was set up to reconnect the returned with their loved ones, her brother had led her to all of her books, sorted by genre and then alphabetized in a storage locker, along with her paintings and sketches.

Her oil paint tubes were also arranged in cool and warm tones, but had long hardened to a chalky, unusable point.

He did have to buy her another bed, mattress, desk – the works; the old ones had paid for his LSATs (his first, second and third sitting of them).

She doesn’t begrudge him for that – not when they barely even interacted, all those years ago, beyond a grunt hello in the mornings before he left New York state altogether. Especially not when he dragged her to IKEA at the earliest convenience and was pretty much near tears the whole time they sat in her new room, struggling to assemble a desk while their father cooked in the kitchen. MJ never thought she’d hear someone sound so choked up over how _There has got to be more screws than this, Em. Where did they go? _

MJ tells Peter this while they’re seated in a café near their gate, with 40 minutes left until boarding – of the soul-crushingly _boring_ week where she basically lived and breathed IKEA, subsisting on lukewarm hotdogs and subpar pasta while trying to rebuild the foundations of her life in some material form. She had already exhausted the lighter topic of showing Peter her drawings in the sketchpad she had brought for the trip, from the three of Mr. Harrington in crisis to the dingy inn they had gone to in Venice.

Peter calls her drawings _awesome_ with the same vigour as the repetitive Star Wars-adjacent discussions he and Ned used to have, a whole era ago. 

Peter also recounts his IKEA-related mishaps with his Aunt May (“There’s something about installing a drawer that’s just… shuts down all your brain cells.”)

“We didn’t have to get anything new when we came back, though,” Peter says. “All of my stuff – and May’s – our tables and chairs, couch, my Star Wars stuff – we got it all back. May still has her old Volvo. My schoolwork was sorted into binders.”

_That's strange_, MJ thinks, _Did Peter have family that survived?_ MJ quirks up an eyebrow, questioning. Signals for him to continue.

“Y-yeah. All of our things. Right after the blip May was really stressed out about how her and I were going to get back on our feet, but Pepper – er – Mrs. Potts said she’d take us apartment hunting whenever we were ready. And that once we did, she’d send our stuff to our new place.”

Peter gulps, like there’s a weight in his throat, solid and stubborn. He runs a hasty hand through his hair.

“Tony bought our entire apartment building back when I – disappeared,” he elaborates. “Happy told me he put Iron Man away, focused on having a family – he had a daughter – and this – alpaca –“

MJ could almost giggle at the mention of an, of all things, an alpaca, but the boy’s voice is pitching just a little too high and light to be wholly normal. MJ wonders if it hurts, blinking so much as he is at the moment, if the flutter of his eyelids feels painful against the slight bruising high up his cheeks. The rest of his body has healed, evidence of previous injury wiped clean by mutant physiology. But there’s still the unmistakable pallor borne of fatigue.

Peter’s not doing a great job at explaining; he’s mostly babbling away, trying and only partially succeeding in making his point clear. Lucky for him, MJ has a certain talent for gleaning meaning from layers of fluff. She can read between the lines, polarize them until it becomes coherent. 

“But he was still looking out for you,” she tells him. “He didn’t want to let you go.”

Peter purses his lips together, and lets out a deep exhale. “Yes. Sorry if I was rambling.”

"Say sorry again and I will get up and leave,” she deadpans.

He considers it for a second and opens his mouth a deliberate, “Sorry.” He tilts his head, contemplative, before adding, “Like, an actual, whole alpaca. It would eat their garden, sometimes.”

“That’s nice,” she says. 

“Yeah. Apparently Tony had a thing for alpacas.”

MJ schools her face into something that’s hopefully sympathetic. There’s a growing part of her that is brimming with questions – her encounters with Spider-man were once, a whole lifetime ago, limited to the local news, DC, and the flashes of whispers between Ned and Peter. She’d been truthful when she told Peter she was only 67% sure about his alter-ego – and maybe she had even generously rounded-up that estimate. 

As much as she wants to act unfazed, that act had partly died once she had come back to life and being unnecessarily mean seemed so trivial. Petty. 

Things are happening way too fast. One second Peter is proposing a nighttime stroll through Prague, and the next he’s panicking and barely holding himself together, going on about EDITH and SHIELD and MJ impressed herself by not freaking out along with him. And then Peter is talking about Iron Man like he knew him.

Which, yeah, makes perfect sense now, with the shared superhero gig and all, but MJ will be the first to admit she hadn’t fully reconciled Peter Parker as the guy strong enough to throw a ton or two like a bag of grapes. The fact that they had been _close_, close – though – wasn’t even adjacent to MJ’s predictions.

So MJ doesn’t say anything else, because she’s not sure what she can even tell him, or if he’d want to hear it. She takes idle sips of her tea, now halfway cooled and turning a dark amber, watching the swirl of leaves at the bottom of her cup. Her thumb sticks through the small, round handle of the ceramic. Peter has his eyes on the table meant for order pick-up: there’s a little framed Iron Man piece, painted in a choppy, vibrant style.

MJ nearly jolts in her seat when he speaks again.

“I wanted to go on this vacation so badly, MJ. You know – me and my dumb plan? I was gonna ask you to go into the Eiffel Tower with me and I’d tell you that I like you,” he says. “It was supposed to be a great, _normal_ time, especially after all the bullshit that’s happened in the past _God_ knows how long.”

“Yeah. To, like, suspend our disbelief and act like nothing had gone wrong. It was kind of the same for me.”

“Right. Like – the first month or two – after – was honestly so bad. I wasn’t handling anything; never wanted to eat, and I cried literally all the time,” he says, huffing with embarrassment. “Half the world came back, and it felt like I lost. The first day back to Midtown I cried on the way to school.”

He says all of this quickly, but doesn’t stumble on any of his words, as if he was at peace with it; he’s not ashamed, but it’s ripping off the band-aid nonetheless. MJ remembered feeling out of place, half the faces in class unfamiliar. She remembers the initial tension, those that had survived trying not to broach the topic of being dusted lest they upset someone. But no one looked quite as anguished as Peter did, who’d only force small smiles when Ned sent him worried glances.

Peter’s mouth is turned up, tight, and MJ realizes she was doing the same thing now. 

“So – there’s that,” Peter mutters. “And it’s gotten a lot better – I promised myself I would move forward – I started patrolling around Queens again. Busted this big group of criminals two nights before we took off. I started being Spider-man again, and I was also ready to – I guess – be Peter Parker again, too? Be _with_ the people I care about instead of just trying to protect them.”

MJ smiles, understanding. “Yeah. Saw you make the front page once or twice.”

Peter has the good humility to preen at that, relaxing for just a moment. Then, the tension in his shoulders returns. He takes the sunglasses off his shirt and toys with the handles, turning the thing around in his hands. “I guess this is dumb, but I wanted to make Europe the big step towards that. Something… tangible – where I could just have fun with you and Ned. But then Beck came along in his – fucking – snow globe head.” 

Peter sighs.

“I _fucked_ up. Beck comes in and –“ Peter halts, and takes a minute to compose himself. He sets the glasses on the table, next to her tea, and makes a rough grab at his own hair. “He was nice to me, the same way Tony was. Made me feel better about the fact that I’m just making things up as I go. That it was okay if I wanted a break. I let him try the glasses on, literally just because I was curious, and all I could see was Tony’s face.”

“And then you gave him the glasses?”

Peter lets out a pained, shuddering breath, but grins with teeth when she makes the inference. He’s overwrought, but not close enough to tears that it that MJ feels her own distress rise past the pit of her stomach and up her chest.

_I feel used,_ he doesn’t say. _I feel stupid. Like my judgement is worth shit. I’m grieving when it’s least convenient to and then I make messes in real-time._

MJ, good at subtext as always, hears it anyway. “It’s okay to miss him,” she says. There’s no assurance that he wasn’t at fault, and that no, everyone probably had the trip of their lives anyway, because the last thing he needs and wants are sweet nothings.

Peter says nothing else, but hums in agreement.

_

MJ gulps down the rest of her tea and pulls him out to the side of the café, where she wraps him into a tight hug. This time she lets herself enjoy the feeling of strong arms across her back, and a firm chest against her own. He smells like minty soap. 

They make some rounds of the airport’s shops to pass the time, holding hands on the way back to their gate.

_

Peter conks out during takeoff, body drooping and hastily snapping back up to awareness only to wilt again after a few seconds. She raises a slow hand towards him, bringing her fingers into his hair. It’s smooth and soft. MJ makes a delicate circular motion, and Peter relaxes into the touch, sighing. Falls into a deeper sleep. 

When Peter wakes up two hours later thanks to a bout of turbulence, MJ’s head is nestled into the crook of his neck, the position a tad odd given the inches she had on him.

Peter gingerly shakes MJ awake as the flight attendants move down the aisle to serve dinner. They eat their gross TV meal together, Peter listening intently as she explains her fourth-favourite murder. They team up to finish their fruit cups, with MJ handing Peter all the grapes in exchange for watery chunks of cantaloupe.

Their unofficial first date is nearly eight hours long, in a big, flying metal cylinder, and it’s perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for dropping in!


End file.
